Aristotle's Rhetoric Part 1

welcome to our lecture on Aristotle's rhetoric we're starting a new section today we just got done with group communication and we're gonna focus on a few theories here that are going to focus on public communication by public communication what we mean is communication from one person to many and so when we talk about rhetoric right that's really what it is that we're talking about we talked about in the traditions in the seven traditions early in the semester we talked about the rhetorical tradition as one of the traditions that we that we might we might come from so if you hear the word rhetoric right like the way that it's used in our everyday life the way that you might hear it uses you might someone might have like a rhetorical question for example or you might say someone's just good at fluffy rhetoric right oh that's mere rhetoric and what that means is kind of this idea of someone who's really good at maybe being a public speaker but doesn't necessarily have the action to follow through on what it is that they're talking about when we talk about rhetoric in this perspective here we're talking about Aristotle's rhetoric we are talking about that public communication but it's also about something a little bit different we're not only interested in communication from one person to many people but we're interested in the communication from one people to many people that's primarily persuasively based and persuasively based what we mean is is communication that's intended to try to either change people's actions or change the way that people think and so what I want you to do is to think about and this might make for a good journal entry is what kind of things you associate with good or powerful rhetoric who are some good speakers that you know that you can think of and what are the things that those people who you can think of as good public speakers what are the things they do that make them good speakers now this theory is is obviously really old it's associated with Aristotle and it's really we think of it as kind of the first systematic study of communication and the reason for that is because um Aristotle was in ancient Greece and ancient Greece was really the birthplace of democracy and so all of a sudden there was this availability of people be able to try to influence the public sphere they try to make the world the way that they wanted to make it rather than right by a dictatorship or an aristocracy or something like that people had the ability to start influencing their government and what happened in the public sphere and so it became important to study well for if that option is available right what became important to study how might we begin going about trying to change the way that people think um no similarly right what are the things you can think of that make someone a bad writer ssin Aristotle described persuasion as finding the available means of persuasion right or that's what he called rhetoric he says the job of a rhetorician is to be able to identify what it takes to move an audience from point A to point B now Aristotle's presumption was that any audience is persuadable right but not every audience is persuadable in the same way every audience is persuadable somehow and it's the job of the rhetoric retirin to try to find those available means of persuasion what does it take to move this particular audience to the place that I want them to be Aristotle described three types of rhetoric and these were the type them these were the ones that were prominent in ancient Greece the first was forensics rhetoric right which is rhetoric in the courtroom which is like an argumentation and Greece was also home of really kind of our idea of a jury of your peers and innocent until proven guilty type of ethic and so forensic rhetoric was something it became more important for Aristotle and ancient Greeks with the advent of democracy there's deliberative which is influencing public policy which are political debates things you can think of I think when we think of rhetoric that's typically what it is that we think about and the last called epideictic which is rhetoric that's about telling us who to either praise or blame who's responsible for a situation so the ancient in ancient Greece you would find people gathered at the center of town sometimes who would engage in rhetoric for fun and one they would often do is I ever died accreditor they would praise generals who had done excellent things in the past right or deride politicians and this you know they didn't have TV a radio or I mean this became kind of a place for people to go to enter be entertained to go listen to appetite knick rhetoric now Aristotle is following the UM the progression here right Aristotle came as a student of Plato and Plato was a student of Socrates and rhetoric addresses what we call the Socratic method and to Plato developed the Socratic method and this is just a little bit about the history of how we get to Aristotle's vision of rhetoric the Socratic method is moving from a one-on-one type of appeal right well the Socratic method is all about is intense questioning to get people to understand what their assumptions about a particular thing are there's a little different right that was primarily the way that people thought that change could happen before Aristotle sort of developing rhetoric and so the Socratic method was being replaced by this idea of one-to-many rather than this kind of intense like conversation between people Aristotle really understood that we could systematically think of how we might reach large numbers of people as well and so the Socratic method right this conversation is what it's supposed to do is it's supposed to help us understand what truth is by questioning our assumptions by us understanding what it is that we're taking for granted we come to understand what is truth rhetoric is not about figuring out what's true Aristotle said you should only resort to writer once you have discovered what truth is also the Socratic method is general what that means is it's about understanding all of our assumptions right understanding the way that we perceive the world where rhetoric sets out to do a specific task a rhetorician wants to accomplish something and that's why he or she would get up in front of a bunch of people it's much different than the Socratic method insofar as that you're setting out with a specific goal rather than this kind of just general sense of trying to understand the world and finally right we're talking about truth so the Socratic method is all about right figuring out what is true in a capital T sense whereas rhetoric is about the probability of convincing an audience at a truth that you've already know because you've engaged in the Socratic method so remember we said it's about finding the available means of persuasion a rhetorician when you get out there and you give it a shot you don't always know what's gonna work but it's about figuring out what's the most probable way that you can move your audience from point A to point B now Aristotle really understood a rhetoric kind of the metaphor that I like to use here is that of a chef right um if we think about what a chef does he or she takes a bunch of ingredients and says alright this needs a little bit of this and a little bit of that and right oh maybe not so much salt a little more pepper right and what you do is you you kind of flavor it to see what that particular dish really needs Aristotle understood a rhetorician the same way he said a rhetorician has ingredients right much like a chef would and it's a job of the rhetorician to say ok we need a little bit of this more of that not so much of this and his rhetorical proofs would really be the ingredients that you as a chef as a rhetorician have to play with let's talk about those he gave us three rhetorical proofs and you might have covered these two previous classes because they're very popular and is still very influential the first is logos which is the idea of logical arguments now if we ask what logic is it's really hard to really think through what it actually is because it's so taken for granted you know what logic is is a set of rules that lead to an inevitable conclusion if you've ever taken a logical or what it actually seems like is it's like a math class with words in a lot of ways well if you get people to say right if this is true and this is true and this is true then this thing has to be true now logic is is fairly well valued within our society today but four thousand years ago or so back in ancient Greece logic was really used quite differently because um it's really a novel idea because logic relies on the idea that everyone has to play by the same set of rules just because you're King doesn't make your logic any more sound than if I'm a slave for example and logic is this idea that everyone is subject to the same type of rules and so this kind of overarching even equalizer which puts people on the same plane and the example of the famous rhetorical proof that Aristotle provides is what he called an enthymeme which is our syllogism what's right you'll see how it leads to inevitable conclusions we say okay so we have a general premise we say that something is true of a set of things right so we say hard work is rewarded now we have a specific premise right the thing that's not to have a class of things but true about a specific thing this is I work hard now we can easily guess here what the conclusion is here if these two things are true the next thing has to be true right and so we have here right the conclusion is I will be rewarded so if we're moving here from it a thing that's true of a class of things to a specific things this has to be true now if you were going to argue with this right what you need to do is you can't argue with this conclusion but you could argue that one of these two premises is not valid all right I could say hard work is not always rewarded or maybe I don't work hard anyway I'll be right back

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Length: 9min 56sec (596 seconds)

Published: Sat May 14 2011